Welcome to the Back to School 2016 issue of Turtle Talk, the Terrapin newsletter.

Back to School: 20% off all printed mats!

The Go Cart Rally Mat and all printed mats are 20% off through October 31.

To celebrate the start of school, Terrapin is offering 20% discount on all printed mats. This includes skills and narrative mats for Bee-Bot and Blue-Bot along with the Pro-Bot Route Mat.

Check out the Go Cart Rally Mat, Terrapin's newest Bee-Bot/Blue-Bot mat. Hear the crowds cheer when you race Bee-Bot or Blue-Bot around the track. With its many twists and turns, the Go Cart Rally Mat encourages longer programs and is an excellent tool for teaching directions and sequencing.

School Library Journal, the premiere publication for librarians and information specialists who work with children and teens, recently published Never Too Young to Code, in which they consider the learning benefits and best practices for coding with children as young as three years old.

Coding brings young children rich opportunities for language development and the "notion of learning from mistakes," says Chip Donohue, the Dean of Distance Learning at the Erikson Institute in Chicago, a graduate school in child development. "We actually don't do enough of that with young kids." Sequencing and patterns involved in programming reinforce skills that have always been taught in the early years, but now also create "habits of mind that are essential for the 21st century," he adds.

Everyone at Terrapin was saddened to learn that Logo creator Seymour Papert died July 31 at age 88. For 30 years, Terrapin has published Terrapin Logo, an evolving programming environment based on the original philosophy and implementation developed and popularized by Prof. Papert. His ideas and insights live on in the products he inspired and the millions of students and teachers whose creativity was sparked by his influence.

Papert's theories of learning and development revolutionized how children are taught, particularly in the area of technology, and continue to impact classrooms across the world today. Logo, the first computer language designed for children, enabled them to program a "turtle," the on-screen partner of programmable robots such as Bee-Bot. Papert said "the child programs the computer and, in doing so, both acquires a sense of mastery over a piece of the most modern and powerful technology and establishes an intimate contact with some of the deepest ideas from science, from mathematics, and from the art of intellectual model building."